The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  In Europe, the sensibilities ran along a different vein. A frontier mentality of sorts existed, but in a more vicarious fashion. The various colonial adventures of the great European powers drew Europeans to the four corners of the Earth. Some came as settlers—to America, Australia, and South Africa—and adopted a frontier psyche. But many others came as colonial administrators, military personnel, and agents representing business and political interests back home. They were extensions of the Old World and never really shed their Europeanness.

  For Europeans, the search for security was always more bound up in embeddedness in communities—whether indentured in medieval fiefs or fortressed away in craft guilds in walled towns. One was secure to the extent one was nested in a community that, in turn, was safe from invasion or encroachment from the outside. The drawbridge, the moat, and the lookout tower are the architectural symbols of the European sense of space. The idea of a lone, self-reliant individual freely roaming across an endless frontier even today makes little sense to Europeans.

  The early success of mobile-phone technology in Europe speaks volumes. The cell phone keeps individuals connected to their communities. But it also allows individuals to break out from the constraints of geography, to be free of place but still connected to others in time. And this gets to one of the fundamental differences in how Europeans and Americans conceive of space and time. Americans covet exclusive space. Each person strives to be self-contained and autonomous. That’s why we put a premium on privacy. Europeans seek inclusive space—being part of extended communities, including family, kin, ethnic, and class affiliation. Privacy is less important than engagement. For Americans, time is future-directed and viewed as a tool to explore new opportunities. For Europeans, time is more past- and present-oriented and used to reaffirm and nurture relationships.

  A comprehensive anthropological study of how people use mobile phones in six countries bears out some of the differences in how Europeans and Americans relate to the new wireless technology. In Sweden, for example, “they view someone talking on their mobile as though the person with whom they’re speaking is physically in the room.”2 As a result, chatting on a mobile phone while eating lunch alone in a restaurant is perfectly acceptable behavior. Italians believe in constant connectivity and like to be reachable at all times. They have no reservations about using mobile phones in any public setting. Americans are a bit more circumspect in their use of mobile phones. New Yorkers, for example, tend to use their mobile phones more to accomplish tasks but also believe that having wireless conversations in public is often intrusive and a violation of others’ private space. While San Franciscans use mobile phones for work- and leisure-related activity and to communicate with friends, some worry about being constantly available all the time, and not having enough alone time.3

  Some commentators have said that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”—that on a very fundamental level, we think so differently that neither can truly understand the thinking of the other. There’s some truth to that argument. While the American consciousness has deep roots in the Old World, the very act of crossing the ocean to recast one’s fate and fortunes in new ways marked a psychological breach as deep and wide as the waters that separate the two continents.

  Those who came to America were the ones who were forced out of their countries or who no longer found security in their former relationships. Some were adventurers anxious to escape their confinement. Others were poor and destitute, and willing to sacrifice, and even to die, to find a new, more secure existence. The ones who left were in search of a new kind of security. They found it on the American frontier. Those who stayed behind continued to look to tight-knit communities for their solace.

  Today, these very different attitudes about security find their expression in a hundred and one different ways in the marketplace, the civil society, and in the halls of government. Europeans tend to favor social democracy and a community commitment to redress the plight of the less fortunate and the poor, whereas Americans preach the virtues of self-reliance and favor a market approach to bettering the lot of their fellow human beings. For Europeans, Karl Marx’s words still find resonance: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Americans prefer to cast their lot with the Scottish economist Adam Smith, who preached a different kind of catechism. In his celebrated An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith laid forth the controversial notion that in a perfectly administered capitalist market economy, each individual works to pursue his own interest, and it is his own welfare alone to which he is dedicated. But in the act of securing his own material well-being, he inadvertently increases the general stock and improves the well-being of his fellows and the rest of society.

  These two very distinctive and contradictory starting points for defining security lead to two divergent journeys in the age of globalization. The software and computer revolutions, the World Wide Web, the mobile communications revolution, the historic shift from a centralized fossil-fuel-energy era into a decentralized hydrogen-energy future, and the spread of biotechnologies, and soon nanotechnologies, into every nook and cranny of human life are all leading to fundamental changes in the way we human beings conceive of space and time, as well as to a rethinking of the kinds of institutional responses that will be needed to accompany our changing consciousness of the world around us. My hunch is that the newly emerging European Dream is far better suited to addressing the spatial and temporal realities of a globalized world than the older American Dream.

  Europe’s Obsession with Space and Time

  From the great European awakening in the late medieval era till now, successive generations have been steadily extending their spatial reach and quickening the pace, speed, flow, connectivity, and density of human exchange. Human activities extended from village to region, then to territorial nation-states, and now to the globe itself. Europe is, today, at the forefront in the struggle to redefine the human condition and the kind of world we will need to fashion to accommodate our new global reach.

  Europe was also the conceptual meeting ground the last time around, at the outset of the modern era, when attention turned to the revolutionary changes in technology and philosophy that, at the time, were beginning to reshape spatial and temporal consciousness. Understanding how Europeans of former generations responded to the challenges of an earlier era, and why they chose the specific philosophical, economic, political, and social paths they did to make the transition to modernity, provides a context and a backdrop for understanding the deep changes occurring today as humanity experiments with new spatial and temporal models for the coming century.

  It is the introduction of new technologies that change our consciousness of spatial and temporal relationships. Tools are an extension of our being. They are a way to amplify our senses so that we can expand our reach in order to expropriate space, compress time, and secure ourselves. A gun extends the power of our throwing arm. An automobile is an extension of our legs. Computers amplify our memories.

  Between the late medieval age and the early modern era, a spate of dramatic new technologies were introduced into Europe that vastly increased human power over space and time.

  The introduction of the heavy wheeled plow into Northern Europe and the substitution of horses for oxen as well as the shift from two-field to three-field rotation brought much more land under cultivation and increased the yield per acre, doubling food production by the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.4 The food surpluses led to a dramatic growth in the human population, which, in turn, led to rapid urbanization. Village hamlets gave way to small towns and then cities. The cities attracted skilled artisans and merchants and stimulated the beginning of sustained domestic commerce and trade, for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.5

  Thousands of water mills and windmills were built across Europe, providing a new source of inanimate power for grinding grain, making beer, sawing wood, producing pape
r, fulling cloth, and operating the bellows of blast furnaces. By the fourteenth century, Europeans could claim significant strides in substituting mechanical for human power in most of the basic industries.6

  A German, Johannes Gutenberg, invented the first print press with movable type in 1436, creating a revolution in communications that would become the indispensable command-and-control mechanism for organizing modern commerce and trade and for speeding up transactions and exchanges.

  Keeping track of vastly sped-up commercial transactions taking place over much longer distances required the kind of record-keeping that would have simply been impossible in an oral or script culture. Modern book-keeping, schedules, bills of lading, invoices, checks, and promissory notes, all so critical to the flow of modern commerce, were products of print technology. And print made possible the system of uniform pricing, without which modern notions of market exchange could not have evolved.

  Print also changed spatial and temporal relationships in other profound ways. The late Walter J. Ong reminds us that because in oral cultures learning was passed on by word of mouth, storytelling and proverbs were ways to keep knowledge alive. Skills were passed down between parent and child and between master and apprentice by mouth. Very little practical knowledge was ever written down. Because communication was oral, it required close proximity between speakers and listeners. Oral cultures, by their very nature, are more intimate and communal.

  Print cultures are very different. The author of an article or book rarely comes into close physical contact with the reader. Writing and reading are both carried out in relative privacy. Print breaks down the communal bond and reinforces the radical new idea of communications between people separated by great distances.

  Printed books also brought the world into every home. It was now possible to learn about people in far-off lands. The human imagination was lifted from the parochialism of the immediate environment and allowed to roam the Earth.

  The improvements made in the compass and the increasing use of maritime charts and maps allowed European explorers and adventurers to circumnavigate the African continent and cross the Atlantic to America. The colonization of vast new lands had a dramatic effect on Europeans’ sense of space.7 All of a sudden, the world was a much bigger place. Filling it became a European obsession. Millions of Europeans migrated to the far reaches of the Earth in ensuing centuries, spreading their religious, economic, and political beliefs in the firm conviction that they were bringing the light of civilization to the primitive and backward peoples of the Earth. In Britain alone, more than a million people sailed to America, Australia, and New Zealand in just one short twenty-five-year period between 1815 and 1840.8

  The shift in energy regimes from wood to coal and the introduction of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century greatly accelerated the pace, flow, and density of economic activity. The industrial revolution quickly found its legs. After nearly ten thousand years of society relying on human and animal power and the wind and currents to propel itself, steam power now afforded a qualitative leap in the harnessing of the Earth’s energy. The time taken to travel distances was shortened, and human exchanges—of both a social and commercial nature—were sped up. Just a few hundred years ago, the average human being, isolated in rural villages and small walled towns, might come in contact with no more than a few hundred people in a lifetime. By 1863, London—the first city since the fall of Rome to reach a population of more than one million—could boast several mail deliveries a day. A letter posted early in the morning to another London address could not only bring a reply, but do so in time for a further letter from the first writer to be delivered before the day was out.9

  Faster, cheaper, and safer modes of travel—steamships and trains—broadened people’s spatial horizons more profoundly than in any previous period in human history. By 1830, an émigré could set sail from Europe on a steamship to America and pay as little as two pounds for the passage. 10 Journeying over longer distances used to be so dangerous that the root of the word “travel” is “travail.” By the nineteenth century, travel had become, of all things, a form of entertainment. An enterprising Englishman, Thomas Cook, began ferrying people by train, and later by ship, to visit places of fascination and interest. He called his adventures “excursions.”

  The reorganization of space and time in the early modern era wreaked havoc on the institutions of medieval Europe. The Church, the feudal economy, and warrior kingdoms proved too provincial and slow to accommodate the dramatic spatial and temporal changes that were remaking European life, and they eventually gave way to three new institutions—modern science, the market economy, and the nation-state. The new institutions were far better equipped to organize human life in a radically different spatial and temporal setting.

  Similarly, today, orthodox science is being shaken to its foundations by new ways of understanding and organizing nature. Likewise, the market economy is being challenged by a new network model for organizing commerce and trade. Meanwhile, the nation-state is steadily making room for regional and global forms of governance that can better assimilate the new technological realities and changes in human consciousness that characterize the era of globalization.

  To fully grasp the importance of the current experiment unfolding in Europe, we need to step back and relook at how and why modern science, the market economy, and the nation-state emerged in Europe in the wake of the last great transformation of spatial and temporal consciousness. By doing so, we can begin to appreciate the enormity of the task at hand for the new Europe as it begins to reinvent itself once again for a new era.

  Colonizing Nature

  A number of important changes occurred in the way Europeans organized their relationship to the natural world in the early modern era. Those changes gave birth to what we know today as modern science.

  First, the world of nature was demystified or desacralized, depending on whether you adhere to the rational or romantic school of thought. The very idea of nature as a reality unto itself, a primal kingdom, or fallen Eden, gave way to the more modern utilitarian idea of nature as a storehouse full of raw resources waiting to be made productive by science and put to use in the marketplace.

  The artists of the Renaissance, interestingly enough, became the unknowing agents who helped chase God from his earthly kingdom, only to make room for the new overseers, the men of science. Donatello, Uccello, and Piero della Francesca had no idea that the radical new invention called “perspective” would eventually help topple a millennium of church rule.

  Our story begins with the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. The first thing American tourists notice when visiting Europe’s magnificent places of worship is that there is no way to get a decent photograph of the grand edifices from any distance. Most of the major cathedrals of Europe are ensconced in the center of old cities and surrounded by ring upon ring of buildings extending outward in concentric circles. There is sometimes a plaza in front of the main portico, like the ones at the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame in Paris and the Duomo in Milan. But, for the most part, the cathedrals are buried by their human surroundings. They are meant to be a magnet, drawing everyone from the surroundings to them. They are purposefully in the very center of their communities—a strong reminder that in days of yore, life was lived in a cocoon of embedded relationships and the church was the soul of the community.

  We Americans are in love with views, especially from commanding heights. If we can afford it, we’d much prefer to place our home at the very top of a hill, and at a distance from our nearest neighbors, affording us a daily reminder of our autonomy. Our sense of exclusivity makes us feel secure and free. But Europe is laid out differently. Everything is nested up against everything else. The old parts of cities—even the newer sections—are tightly knit together with little space separating neighbors. Partly, this is due to the sheer density of population and the unavailability of land. But mostly, the antecedents stretch back in time to an era where people lived in w
alled cities or on feudal estates. Outside the city walls and fiefs was a world full of uncertainty and risks. In parts of Northern and Central Europe, until the late medieval era, dense forests lay just beyond the cultivated fields and pastures.

  The architecture of old Europe reflects the very different way Europeans of an earlier era perceived space and their own security. In the Middle Ages, one’s sense of security was vertically directed. People looked to the heavens in hopes of securing their eternal salvation and looked down to their ancestral grounds beneath them, where security lay in their honored traditions and community associations.

  In feudal Europe, people belonged to the land and not vice versa. One was born into a station in life and was expected to fulfill a litany of communal obligations that went hand in hand with one’s inherited status. The Christian life was caught up in a larger drama. Space was perceived as a great ladder, a chain of being stretching from the lowliest creatures on Earth to God on high. Each creature was assigned a rung on the ladder of life and expected to serve those higher up as well as to provide for those below. It was a community where rank and membership were determined by heredity.

  Examine some of the beautiful paintings and tapestries that line the church walls in Europe, and you notice that all of the living forms—animals and humans—ascend on a flat plane reaching upward like the great ladder of life that they are depicting. Absent is any sense of perspective. It’s not that the artists of the time were incapable of showing perspective. Rather, perspective was simply not part of the consciousness of the period. In a world where security is found in a tightly bound vertical plane, perspective is rarely considered.

  The introduction of perspective in art during the early Renaissance was a revolution in the human conception of space. For the first time, “man’s” gaze turned from the heavens above to the “landscape” beyond. Perspective places the individual, for the first time, at the center of his world. We see the picture through the eyes of the beholder. It is through man’s eyes, and not God’s grace, that we view the world beyond. And everything in the field of view becomes the object of man’s attention. Perspective brings human beings into a new spatial realm of subject-object relationships. It is the beginning point for what the sociologist Max Weber would later describe as the “disenchantment of the world.”